Cinematization - Text 4
A transferral such as this of opera onto film, despite being highly limited in length in the present case, is a favourable response to the wish expressed in 2010 by the opera critic Christophe Huss[9] to the effect that what is needed when relaying an opera to a screen are, first and foremost, calmly documented performances. Indeed a “shoot” as discreet as that of the Rigoletto quartet in 1927, made on tip-toe one might say, preserves the integrity of the performers’ aura and emphasizes what is shown without there being superimposed on the world recorded by the movie camera another layer of meaning by means of a second-level plastic interpretation (a fundamentally cinematic interpretation and not in the slightest sense operatic). For, as Gaudreault explains, “the découpage supposed by any transmission of an opera by means of a multiple-camera set-up” means that “the filmed opera reaches... the viewer through the filter of a ‘consciousness’ other than that of the [opera] director alone.”[10] Thus a simple and basic recording like that of the Vitaphone short fulfils the “archival” function of filming moving images. In a case such as that, the filmed narrative seeks simply to replicate what is acted on the stage. The simple shooting of this acting, a date-stamped and date-stampable performance, does not lose any of its temporal mooring: what you see in front of you is well and truly the trace, the preserved imprint, of a date-stamped space-time, of an event which took place in the real world, outside the audiovisual world, on a precise date in the calendar, but also at a defined moment in the history of a particular work of opera, the history of a particular opera director and the history of a particular opera house. This event has in a sense been archived by avoiding the use of a complex capturing set-up whose complexity would have led the captured production to surpass, to transcend even, a mere recording, which would make it something other than a simple, “calm” and elementary restoration of the event on screen.
The adaptation for the cinema in the 1970s of Mozart’s The Magic Flute by the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (The Magic Flute, 1975), is especially interesting for this discussion of live transmissions in the present Encyclopaedia, in that Bergman employs in it all the stratagems of cinema while at the same time subjecting the action and its presentation on screen to the codes of “theatrical” representation (as is the case, necessarily, with any opera performance). Indeed Bergman carries out a large-scale cinematization of Mozart’s opera – close-ups, multiple points of view on the same scene, editing, sound effects, film acting, etc. – but he proceeds as if the action was unfolding in a “theatrical” and operatic setting; as if the action to which he gives the film viewer access was in a sense taken from a real stage performance of the opera in question (with outright “theatrical” decors and costumes in the style of baroque theatre) and by sometimes showing activity in the wings and the mechanics of changing the decor. In fact what he shot was in reality a reconstitution of the play piece by piece in a studio. Because Bergman employed various registers specific to film language, what he shot went beyond, for this very reason, the level of simply shooting, and derives instead from filming (in the sense in which Gaudreault and Marion employ the term). It is no longer a mere recording.
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[9] Christophe Huss, “Le Metropolitan Opera au cinéma – Pour les yeux d’Elina,” Le Devoir, 18 January 2010, https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique/281282/le-metropolitan-opera-au-cinema-pour-les-yeux-d-elina.
[10] André Gaudreault, “Recording, Remediating and the Creation of Attractional Packages.”
